by Marvin Kaye
“Let me ask you two more things, then,” Holmes said. “First, can you repeat to me that saying about self-aggrandizing speech which begins ‘As we say in medicine’?”
I laughed and obliged him. “Of course. It goes: ‘As we say in medicine, if you’ve seen one instance of a malady, you say, “In my experience . . .” If you see two, you say, “In case after case . . .” And if you see three, you say, “In my series . . .” ’ ”
We laughed together at that.
The door bore a carved letter N, surrounded for the occasion by a black-ribbon wreath. I rapped with the griffin-shaped knocker.
Then Holmes asked, “How many people have you met who are really like Madeline?”
“Just the one.”
“So ‘in your experience,’ then, the lives of Madelines turn out sadly. Yet all the evidence isn’t in. Talk to her, Watson. ‘He who is too shy to ask questions will never learn.’ ”
“Who said that, Confucius?”
“Rabbi Theodor Klein.”
The door opened and we went in.
We were shown into an enormous parlour hung with black draping. A dozen weary men and women of what had obviously been a larger crowd earlier sat in armchairs waiting for the rosy fingers of dawn to release them from their vigil.
Against the far wall, a raised funeral bier had been erected, surrounded by numerous small tables which held enormous displays of white lilies, and carnations twisted into the shape of the cross, and such-like. I stepped up to the bier which held the mortal remains of Lord Randall, Earl of Norris. The carved mahogany casket was the most elaborate I had ever seen. The funeral home’s “men’s best” casket, I supposed. He looked good, even better than before; he was clean and tidy (somebody had got all the blood off him), and at last he finally wasn’t doing anything, the sight of which came as a relief to me. He had, surprisingly, the same expression on his face which had bothered me so much before—a look of eminent self-satisfaction. Perhaps this was just an accident of the shape of his mouth. I would ask a phrenologist.
“John! John Watson!”
I turned toward Madeline like a flower turns towards the sun.
She wore black, of course, but the intervening years had rounded and ripened her so that black became her, for the same reason that black can make the very young and thin look pinched and angular.
Behind her, trying to affix a necklace around Madeline’s neck was Jane, so that all I could see of her at first was her hands around Maddy’s throat.
“Well, John, what do you think?”
It was a grey pearl choker, and went well with Madeline’s eyes.
“It looks exactly as it should,” I said.
“Young Randall found that today,” Jane told me, “when he was going through a deed box. As soon as he saw it he said, ‘is for Lady Madeline’ ”
“Randall,” Madeline said to the child, “this is your cousin, Dr. John Watson, but you may as well call him Uncle. You’re the man of the house now, so it’s your job to welcome him and introduce him to those who are here.”
“Hello, Dr.—Uncle John!” the boy said, and shook my hand manfully. A beautiful boy he was; he looked to be about eleven, with amber curls and eyes like the blue in a flame. “Welcome. Of course you already know my mothers (your cousins), and these gentlemen are my father’s friends and hunting companions.” Young Randall introduced each by name, and told of the biggest animal each had shot. We all shook hands and Randall Junior seemed pleased with our progress. After he had introduced all the well-dressed gentleman, he turned to the houseman. “This is Gregory,” Randall Junior continued. “Gregory’s family has been in service to this family for seventy-two years.” Gregory nodded. Then a smile stole across the lad’s face as he came to the good part: “Every Saturday morning, all of us—all of us men, that is—go hunting. And of course they go with us.”
He was pointing to a trio of sizeable dogs who had set up shop beneath the bier and so were able to guard their still master and rest at the same time. “The black and tan dog is called Sammy. Sammy is fast and never quits. The fawn-color dog is Topaz. Topaz is Sammy’s mother.” As the child mentioned the dogs’ names, each pricked up its ears, but otherwise lay very still. “Father said that Topaz was too old for the hunt and probably wouldn’t come back with us one of these weeks. So I said just leave her here in the house. He said no. But now he’s not going on the hunt . . . So I’m not going on the hunt. Lady Madeline and Mother say a young man can learn to do other things besides read and hunt. But I like to hunt! I also like Science. I’m going to be a famous inventor one day like Thomas Edison and Jules Verne. O! I forgot to say we have a retriever, too. A Labrador. She’s the stout black one. We named her Little Doris after the Dickens play.”
One of the hunters turned to us. “I say, don’t you mean Little Dorrit?”
“No,” young Randall said firmly, “she isn’t.”
The gentleman looked away and began adjusting his watch-fob.
“Dr. Watson, Uncle! Madeline tells me you know everything there is to know about science, and that you might be able to explain some of it, too.”
I spied Holmes in a corner of the room near a pianoforte and an enormous harp. My friend seemed to be enjoying a pipe near an open window, and some amusement at our conversation as well.
The hunters were putting on their coats. “Randall dear,” Maddy said to the child, “please find my cloak and your mother’s and meet us by the front door, would you? Then the three of us may take a morning stroll together.”
The child bolted into action and was seen no more.
Madeline took my hand, and walked me to the funeral bier.
“Maddy, I’ve worried about you my whole life,” I told her.
“I’ve noticed that, John, and I’ve never understood why.”
“Well, you could have married and had a family, but these people just made a nanny out of you.”
“Oh, John, that’s what all your beautiful letters said, but that isn’t what happened.”
“What did happen?”
“With this marriage, each of us got what we wanted, that’s what. Jane wanted Randall. Jane’s father wanted to see Jane well wed. Randall married a beautiful woman, has a well-brought-up heir, and he hunted in the forest every Saturday morning, and visited women Tuesdays and every Saturday night. Randall’s uncle wanted Randall to marry for advantage. Maybe if Randall hadn’t extorted huge interest on a loan he made to Jane’s father when my father died, maybe we wouldn’t have thought to extort Randall’s proposal. But as I said, everyone got what he wanted.”
“I notice,” I said, “that you never said what you wanted.”
Madeline grinned. “I’ve never had to say what I wanted. It simply came to me: your friendship, the chance to spend my life with the woman I love, seeing her happy, our boy . . .”
Which reminded me: “He has very unusual eyes, doesn’t he?” I said, looking right at her. “I’ve only seen eyes like that once before.”
If she understood me, she pretended not to. “Judging from the company you keep, I can only hope the eyes you speak of aren’t floating in a jar somewhere.”
“And now he’s the new earl,” I persisted.
“A minor earl,” Madeline said. “And you know better than anyone he is his father’s son. The earlship is uncontested. Young Randall is the sole heir. It would simply revert to the Crown, else-wise. Let’s not speak of such a thing. I brought you here to ask two favours of you.”
“Anything.”
“You always say that.”
“I always mean that.”
“I suspect you do. But to what purpose?”
“Since childhood it’s been plain to me that one or two bad men ruined your life.”
“John! What a romantic notion! Short of killing me, how could anyone ruin my life? Even then, my life would only be stopped; the parts gone by wouldn’t be ruined.” Madeline looked at me determinedly. “Believe me, nobody can ruin my life for me.”
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I believed her.
“Now that I’ve made clear I’m not owed anything, may I still ask you for two favours?”
“Three wishes.”
“Only have two right now. The first is—Randall Junior needs something to do on Saturdays. What he doesn’t know is you are the closest thing he has to a father. He needs someone who’ll show him some manly arts other than simply taking aim . . .”
“I’m sure it isn’t that bad, but I know Mary will be pleased to have company, and the lad might go on some of my rounds with me, if he’s interested.”
“He is!”
“Done, then. I am honoured. How else might I help?”
“Well, this last favour is rather more complicated. It has to do with paying a debt of sorts. Money isn’t the problem.”
I raised my eyebrows until she spoke again. “I fibbed when I said everyone got the result they wanted. I left someone out. Can you guess who? Come on, you know. Vittoria.”
The mention of her name startled me. “You feel responsible for Vittoria’s death?”
“Of course! I don’t know exactly what happened, but we shouldn’t have encouraged Randall. We were selfish. We should have warned him to stay away from her.”
“That would have been ruinous for your family.”
“No,” Madeline said. “We had already achieved ruin. If anyone paid a price, it was Vittoria. Which is so very unfair.”
This discussion was beginning to worry me. There were things I might rather not know. Perhaps that explained why I never asked her certain questions. “Well, to be practical,” I said, “What could you possibly give Vittoria now that she would want?”
Maddy looked at me, astonished. “Why, what did Vittoria ever want? Fame. Immortality. To be acknowledged. You know when Jane and I were expecting the baby, we hoped we’d have a girl so we could name her Vittoria. Randall would have been livid, but there are two of us . . . Of course, we had a son, and Randall named him. Did you guess? You did?
“So as soon as our boy started sleeping through the night, we began a second plan to make amends to Vittoria. Many highly skilled riders are women, yet in the parks, the horseback statues are ever paying homage to men, men of war. Maybe there’s a statue of the maid of Orleans, Jeanne d’Arc, on horseback, but I’ve never seen one. I’d be surprised if Coventry has a statue for Lady Godiva; I’d like to see that! Jane and I want to erect a life-size monument to Vittoria the Circus Belle, in a public park, square or garden. We’ve worked very hard on this. We have collected two portraits, some sketches by a sculptor and we have three tinted albumen print photographs of Vittoria herself, one in full costume! Her hair can’t have been that red, can it? No! But since we’ve already let her down once, we’re terrified we’ll compromise something else: her costume, her pose, her smile, the plaque. So there are problems. Once word gets out about the costume, unless this is established as a favoured theme by distinguished gentlemen, Jane and I fear all our plans will be for nought, and that Vittoria will be as unremembered as she is dead. But you, John, you and your friend Holmes who’s hiding between the harp and the window, you know a lot of people.
“What do you say, John Watson? Will you support us? Don’t you think Vittoria deserves a statue in the city of London?”
I thought of Vittoria as I’d seen her first, standing horseback when Frederick told me she was Kay Dunn. How thrilling, how self-contained, how perfectly balanced and alive she was, muscled and practiced to do just as she liked, till all London was enamoured of the mere idea of her. I wished I had seen her show. I felt poorer knowing I’d go to my grave never witnessing all she lived for.
I also felt poorer that she’d gone to her grave with me doubly in attendance. I fancied myself a humanitarian and a healer, but given my performance on the day of her death, I may as well have shot the poor woman at close range.
“Madeline,” I said to her. “I swear you and Jane shall get your statue raised, even if I must speak with every London horsewoman and every patron of the arts and every member of Parliament.”
Maddy gave out a whoop of joy. In her delirium, she grabbed and kissed me on the face and neck, and then sped downstairs to tell Jane the news. I doubt that Madeline knew she was kissing me, but I knew she had been, and I felt dizzy and weak like an expectant mother in a cinched whalebone corset.
I staggered over to Holmes, my face doubtless purple from recent intrigue. Holmes gestured, at me or at the dead man, I’m not sure which, saying, “A sage can learn from a fool; a fool cannot learn even from a sage.”
I tried to keep pace. “Rabbi Klein tell you that?”
“It’s a Buddhist precept.”
“Aha. What else have you been pondering?”
“I’ve decided to obtain some camel’s milk. Not much, maybe a pint.”
“Whatever for?”
“To try with my tea.”
“But why the devil camel’s milk?”
“In four thousand years, no new animal has been domesticated, so I won’t wait, I’ll choose among the milks of those mammals already tamed. I read that camel’s milk won’t curdle, which seems a fine quality.”
“But gad, Holmes, what can camel’s milk taste like?”
“Precisely why I must obtain some,” Holmes said. “I will let you know next week.”
We stood for a time staring out the window. “Did you see the man from Surrey?”
“Surrey? I didn’t notice.”
“The man who let us in, their driver, I should think. Did you note the hair-loss pattern?”
“Yes. Smallpox I’d say.” From across the room I could easily see the rough area where it had started on the neck, and without wanting to, I visualized the small red lesions boiling relentlessly across one side of his head and half his face over the course of days. It was the sort of thing one waited out at a respectful distance, hoping first it wasn’t deadly in this instance, and second that the disfigurement wouldn’t be too great. “Must have been dreadful,” I noted.
“Tends to be,” Holmes remarked. We walked to the window and looked out as the first wan rays of light seeped into the night sky. “Speaking of medical matters,” Holmes said, reaching into a pocket, “do you know what this is?”
I opened a tiny Chinese box of carved red resin. Inside was a glass tube marked with gradations. It was the vial of the syringe implicated in Vittoria’s death!
“The clean-up man at the circus! That was you?”
“The same.”
“May I?”
“Sniff as you please.”
“Chamomile!” My dear cousin had given Randall chamomile tea, and told him it was a deadly abortifacient toxin. Thanks in part to her unwillingness to harm anyone (and to the vanity of women, and to the sturdiness of corsets), Madeline’s bastard son became a landed earl, while she lives out her days married in all but name to her cousin, her closest female friend.
I, too, got what I’d wanted: a wife, a family, Madeline’s happiness and even, in the way she chose to bestow it, her earthly love. Consider: This boy whose conception I witnessed, which event took in large measure not Madeline’s innocence, after all, but mine (for that day I learned to hate), this boy whose mother I have always loved will now be like a son to me. My sweet Mary will welcome a child’s presence, if only a day a week. Perhaps the contact will help her to conceive. One hears of such things happening.
After seeing Madeline so happy today, I believed anything could happen!
I watched the three of them now out on the lawn in front of the house, less Lord Randall’s victims at this late date, than his survivors: Madeline and Jane in long cloaks walked side by side, conversing, the boy in the lead as the sun rose. One needn’t drink camel’s milk, I was fairly sure, to have a surprise with one’s breakfast. What could be less exotic than one’s own cousin? Yet all this time I imagined her as some put-upon Cinderella while she was living the life she dared to imagine.
Perhaps camel’s milk is tasty. Surely, worth a try.
The light intensified as it usually does—another perfectly ordinary English morning. The women and the child heard a singing in the sky and looked up. Overhead flew an exaltation of larks.
Contributors Notes
HENRY SLESAR won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar for The Gray Flannel Shroud and television’s Emmy award for his former position as head writer of the long-running daytime drama The Edge of Night. His prolific writing career includes over five hundred short stories, of which approximately one-third are science-fantasy, a novel adapted into film as Twenty Million Miles to Earth, and scripts for the TV classic series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Another Sherlock Holmes story, “The Case of the Notorious Canary Trainer,” appears in The Resurrected Holmes.
H. PAUL JEFFERS is the author of more than thirty books of fiction and nonfiction, including the Sergeant John Bogdanovic mysteries, A Grand Night for Murder and Readers Guide to Murder, and a pair of Sherlock Holmes novels, The Adventure of the Stalwart Companions and Murder Most Irregular.
PETER CANNON’s literary parodies include Scream for Jeeves, a combination of the styles and themes of P. G. Wodehouse and H. P. Lovecraft; Pulptime, a novel about Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes, and “Holmes and the Loss of the British Barque Sophy Anderson,” a Holmes story in the style of C. S. Forester, published in The Resurrected Holmes. A native Californian, Mr. Cannon grew up in Massachusetts and now divides his time as a freelance writer between London and New York.
PAT MULLEN is a New York University theatre teacher and author of The Stone Movers (Warner Aspect Novels). Her stories, “Lydia’s Season,” “The Curse of the Wandering Gypsy” and “Don’t Open That Book!” have appeared, respectively, in Marvin Kaye’s GuildAmerica anthologies Angels of Darkness, Witches and Warlocks and Don’t Open This Book.
KATHLEEN BRADY is the author of Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (University of Pittsburgh Press), Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball (Hyperion) and a novel, Inside Out (W. W. Norton). She has appeared on the A&E Biography program The Rockefellers, and the PBS series The Prize. She is a resident of New York City.